


the treason, the fantasies of leaving

by clean



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: "all friendship is romantic" - archie andrews probably, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Nightmares, Pre-Season/Series 03, Trauma, i heavily imply archie is gay. apologies. it's in my nature
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:33:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25030972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clean/pseuds/clean
Summary: “I don’t know.” Maybe Cassidy Bullock was as good as dead when Archie ran into the woods after him, or maybe he’d still be alive if Archie hadn’t kept running when he heard the gunshot. But you look at it either way and it’s still Archie’s fault. “I just ran.”
Relationships: Archie Andrews/Betty Cooper, Archie Andrews/Jughead Jones, Archie Andrews/Veronica Lodge
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	the treason, the fantasies of leaving

**Author's Note:**

> insp by archie’s nightmare sequences in 3x01, the entirety of 3x09, and the scene in 3x01 @ the campfire where archie says “i didn’t kill anyone, but i could’ve” and looks up at jughead. like king i’m gonna get you out of there.
> 
> this wasn’t supposed to be any specific relationship-centric but it’s me and we’re talking about archie andrews so. it’s ship-adjacent at the very least. definitely undertones of internalized homophobia. tfw all your close relationships are fucked up <3
> 
> content warning for discussion of past CSA (+internalized victim-blaming), generally traumatic situations and memories, and blood/canon-typical violence… the riverdale norm unfortunately

It’s the morning and it’s foggy outside, clouds of mist concealing the ends of Sweetwater River in both directions. There are so many people and everyone’s wearing jackets. It’s summer. It shouldn’t be this cold. They’re fishing a red-haired teenage boy’s body out of the river.

He notices Betty first, in that pink dress and her light blue jacket. Cardigan? Jacket? Button-up sweater? Archie’s never bothered to learn the difference, no matter how many times Veronica has tried to explain it to him. “Betty?” he’s calling out, but she doesn’t even notice, like she can’t even hear him. She’s crying in a delicate sort of way, looking like some sort of tragic heroine in a renaissance painting, something equal parts sad and beautiful—art history is more of Veronica’s thing.

A cold feeling hits him in the chest: it’s him in the body bag, he realizes, watching Betty bundle herself tight in her cardigan. Even Alice, who’s never really liked him anyway, is looking on, distraught. When he looks around he catches sight of Veronica and her mother, unfeeling and cold in that usual way of theirs, just like they had been on the day Jason’s body was found—he supposes nothing would’ve changed. They never knew him, anyway. And when he turns to look for his father, it’s Jughead standing there next to Fred, holding each other up—his surrogate son, Cheryl had called him once, the day before Jason disappeared.

“I’m still here,” he says aloud. “Guys?” But then he blinks and it’s all dark when his eyes open, with the horrible sound of footsteps on gravel closer than ever, and now it’s him in the body bag for real. He’s panicking. He wants to shout something but he’s unable to say anything in that awful way that feels like your throat doesn’t exist, like you never learned to speak in the first place, like your vocal cords have been ripped out.

He can still hear his surroundings, at least: the crunch of the gravel, voices. “I loved him, mom,” Betty’s choking out, close by and clear as day, and distantly, he hears Veronica tell Hermione “it’s the guy yesterday’s assembly was about, I think.”

Veronica doesn’t know who he is and Betty is crying and he hasn’t even heard Jughead say a word and, most horrifically, everything will eventually go back to normal. They’re going to load him in a car, he realizes, they’re going to put him in a grave, they’re going to bury him alive.

He hears the back of a van open. _Wouldn’t be the first time,_ he thinks.

  
  
  


He wakes up in last summer again, July Fourth, still on the banks of Sweetwater. Betty’s laying next to him, wearing one of her carefully-crafted summer outfits.

“I thought you liked me,” she says, stretching out in the early-morning daylight. She stares pointedly at the river, at the sun glinting off the water. There’s a car parked thirty feet away, Miss Grundy’s car, he recognizes distantly, but Betty’s spinning a keyring around her finger, so it must be hers.

“I do like you, Betty,” he tells her.

“Not really,” she says bitterly. “Not like you liked—her.”

“Betty,” he says, feeling sick, “I’m sorry.”

“No, I am,” she apologizes, quick to correct any wrong type of emotion. “I know it’s not your fault. Not really. But when you said all that stuff about how she’s the only one who ever understood you—I just couldn’t stop wishing it was me you were talking about.”

“You really don’t,” Archie tells her.

“I do.”

“Really?” he says. You know what? No. He’s angry now. “Really? You wish it was your life I fucked up instead of my own? You wanna feel the guilt of hearing that stupid gunshot? Do you want to feel like throwing up every time you kiss someone? Please, Betty, tell me more about how you wish you were in my shoes. I’d love to hear all about it.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she says calmly as she puts on a pair of sunglasses, still not bothering to look over at him. “You know that.”

This isn’t real. “I hate her so much,” Archie continues, not caring, “and I still feel like it was my fault because I could’ve just tried a little harder. I’m the one who wanted it, Betty. That’s on me.”

“All I’m saying is that it hurt me,” she says. “Like it or not, you still hurt me.”

“You really brought us together, though,” Archie hears, and he turns and Jughead is on Betty’s other side, putting his arm over her shoulders. He’s wearing three layers—some things never change. “It should’ve been us together on the Fourth,” he says. “But it’s okay. It’s high school. We’ll all get over things like that eventually.”

“Everyone’s over me,” Archie says, feeling like high school might end up defining his whole existence—either he’s doomed to the poor mimicry of cliques and popularity contests for the rest of his life or he simply won’t live to see graduation. One option is a lot easier than the other, he thinks.

“Oh, we’re not,” Betty tells him. “But it’s easier to pretend.” She leans back on Jughead, his arm unconsciously moving down to her waist—Archie hates watching them.

“Life moves on, Archie,” Jughead says. “It’s better to accept that as fact sooner rather than later.”

“I don’t want to talk to you two anymore,” Archie says, lying back down on their blanket in the grass, wishing himself back to sleep.

  
  
  


He’s outside Pop’s. He’s supposed to meet Betty, to talk about her internship and this summer and everything, and he’s going to have to lie and he hates it. But she’s going to bring up _them_ today, what they would sound like as BettyandArchie instead of just Betty and Archie. Kevin’s already warned him not to break her heart, so it’s for sure coming, but maybe if he acts like he doesn’t hear it enough she’ll understand. After all, she’ll find someone else someday. She might have already, in her time in LA. He’s not irreplaceable.

When Archie enters the diner it’s dark, later at night. He must’ve completely missed his totally-not-date with Betty at this point. Or it’s a different occasion entirely—a replay of one night last year in June, when he’d stumbled into Pop’s in the middle of a rainstorm, unsure of what he was doing there. As always, and just as it had been that night, Jughead is the only one around.

“You’re dripping wet,” Jughead says simply, even though Archie knows that in reality they’d been fighting and he had greeted him first, had sat down across from him and talked about their childhood in a sad attempt to find comfort, to feel good about something for once. “You ever heard of an umbrella?”

“Not really, no,” Archie says, and they slip into silence. He watches Jughead type for a minute, absentmindedly reaches up to feel how wet his own hair is—how long had he been standing out in the rain, contemplating? He wants to mention something about their Fourth-of-July tradition but can’t bring himself to say it. He doesn’t _try_ to make promises he can’t keep; it’s more of a passive action.

“Oh my god,” Jughead says, looking up, and Archie looks up too, and suddenly he’s kneeling on the floor and a man in a hood has a gun to his head and he’s not saying anything at all and his dad is on the ground with a bullet in him again. He squeezes his eyes shut.

“This is what you get,” the Black Hood says, sounding eerily like Hiram Lodge. “This is the end all sinners receive.” Archie’s already lived through this once. He opens his eyes and it’s Veronica staring down at him, cloaked in black with deep red lipstick on, not unlike the day they’d met. She tilts her head to the side.

“We’ve had this moment coming for us from the very beginning, Archiekins,” she echoes, a remnant of a different Veronica in a different time. Her finger is on the trigger. There’s a click, and—

  
  
  


They’re at the lodge. The wooden walls are warm and inviting, warmly-lit and strangely homely, and he’s kissing Veronica.

“Archiekins,” she says, laughing in between kisses, and rolls on top of him, holding herself up on his chest. “Don’t you want me?” Veronica asks, hands moving up, tangling her fingers in his hair. “You want me, right, Archie?”

It’s a weirdly-phrased question. “Of course I want you,” he says, because he does, because it’s the right thing to say, because if he doesn’t want her then what does he want, anyway? What has all this been for if he doesn’t want Veronica? People don’t just betray all their friends and join the mafia on a passing romantic whim. He blinks and she’s wearing lip gloss instead of lipstick (an important distinction, he’s been told), her blonde hair is falling over her face in soft natural waves, and she’s Betty.

“Do you love me, Archie?” she asks, not in the same way she had last year—really only a few months ago if he ever thinks about it too hard. But this time she’s asking for reassurance, not for evidence of the contrary. She’s asking because she genuinely believes it.

“Of course I love you,” he says, even though it’s not really the right thing for him to say, because he does feel something for Betty, something that’s inexplicably tied to history and friendship and their past. Even though he’s dating Veronica. She looks happy, fingers tightening where they’re gripping his t-shirt, not in pain or panic but just in the want to be closer than they already are.

He blinks again and she’s Jughead, free of his beanie in a moment of vulnerability. “Archie,” he says, smiling, and unlike the girls, kisses him without asking any questions—probably for the better. It’s not like Archie would’ve had any answers for him, anyway. Archie responds instantly, because he hasn’t ever been good about talking these things out and as guilty as he may feel about it, this is the one part he’s good at. He’s had too much practice for a sixteen-year-old, really. “Archie,” Jughead repeats in a low whisper, tugging at his hair, breathing hard, “I want you.”

They _have_ to talk about this first, then, right? Archie breaks away and opens his eyes and it’s Betty on top of him again, her knees on either side of his hips, her soft cashmere sweater under his fingers. She looks uncertain.

“We should talk about this before we do anything with each other,” she says. “I don’t want to ruin our friendship.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, even though he clearly hadn’t cared about ruining his friendship with Jughead ten seconds ago.

“Then let’s talk,” she says, detaching herself, lying down next to him. “Did you kill Cassidy Bullock?”

“Great opening to our pillow-talk,” he tells her, then, “I don’t know.” He barely even knew his name, but maybe he did kill Cassidy Bullock. Maybe Cassidy Bullock was as good as dead when Archie ran into the woods after him, or maybe he’d still be alive if Archie hadn’t kept running when he heard the gunshot. (He’s always been like that with gunshots, it seems.) But you look at it either way and it’s still Archie’s fault. “I just ran.”

“Where’d you run, Arch?” Betty asks, reaching out, running her fingers through his hair. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” he answers. “I’m so tired of running.”

  
  
  


He’s in his room, watching Jughead watch him from the other pillow, like every sleepover they’ve ever had.

“Hey,” he says, and Jughead laughs.

“Hey,” he responds, fingers curling and uncurling between them. He always does that, like maybe if Archie watches him doing it enough times he’ll reach out and hold his hand out of worry. It doesn’t work. Archie’s not stupid like that, he _gets_ people, but he just can’t even start to tackle why he _can’t_ just do that, so he pretends he doesn’t notice instead.

“What are you thinking about?” Archie asks. He remembers this conversation: it’s one they had sitting across from each other at Pop’s a few weeks ago, in broad daylight. _I’m worried about your trial,_ Jughead had said, looking out the window. _And junior year. Betty and her family. Hiram. How are we going to go back to normal after this? What if our normal was already too screwed up to begin with?_

“You,” he says instead. 

“What about me?” Archie teases him. “My incessant charm, or my chiseled student-athlete physique?”

Jughead grins. “Shut up,” he says, but all of a sudden he’s crying out in pain and his hands fly to his stomach. There’s a knife protruding from his abdomen. “Archie,” he says, panicking, strained, “Archie, why’d you do that?”

“I didn’t—I don’t,” Archie says, but when he looks down his hands are covered in blood. They always are. “Oh my god,” he says. “Oh my god.”

“It’s okay,” Jughead says, or tries to say, but there’s so much blood everywhere and it has to be hurting him. He breathes heavily, taking hold of Archie’s wrist and clutching it hard enough to hurt. “Archie. It’s okay. This is how it was meant to end.”

“What are you even talking about?” Archie says, desperately trying to stop the bleeding. This isn’t real, it can’t be, but it doesn’t matter whether it is or not: he doesn’t want to watch him die. He can’t.

“If Hiram had called you,” Jughead says, slowly, pained, “would you have killed me?”

“No,” he says, “no, of course not.” The knife won’t come out. What else can he do? “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he says, cradling him to his chest, feeling a little too much like FP, carrying a body through the forest—maybe twice, once an almost-dead Jughead and once a certain red-haired varsity athlete; like FP, already a washed-up high-school football star turned criminal due to time and unfortunate circumstance. Maybe that’s an unfair judgement. Archie doesn’t think he has the right to judge. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s okay,” Jughead assures him, as if he should be saying anything about things being alright with a knife in his stomach. “I know you wouldn’t, Arch. You’d never,” he says, looking up at Archie with tears in his eyes. Jughead almost never cries, even when things get really bad. He beckons for Archie to come closer, until their noses are almost touching, and reaches up to caress his face, cupping his cheek. “You wouldn’t,” he tells him again, voice almost gone. “I know so.”

“Know-it-all,” Archie tells him, feeling wet blood on Jughead’s fingers where he’s touching his cheek, leaving visible marks of guilt all over his face. Jughead smiles, not having enough strength left to laugh.

“Yeah,” he says, and Archie wakes with a start, already breathing hard. Veronica’s hand reaches out to trace his jaw, but he flinches away. She looks at him with more pity than understanding in her eyes. It’s not like he expects her to understand, but it still stings.

“You were hyperventilating,” Veronica tells him, obviously worried. “Archie. Are you okay?”

“I’m just not feeling great,” he says, and Veronica seems to accept that as an answer, or at least accept that she’s not going to get a better one.

“The trial?” she asks. _Yes. No. It’s everything._

“Yeah,” he says. “The trial.”

“You should get some sleep,” she says sympathetically, her dark-painted nails skimming up and down his arm in some semblance of comfort—it doesn’t help. He hates to admit it, but nowadays the nights he’s with Veronica are the longest ones, spent obsessively watching his back (literally, more often than not) and always waking up tired.

“Yeah,” he agrees, turning over on his side, feeling her arms curling around him. Familiar, maybe. Constricting, also maybe.

“Good night,” she says.

“Good night,” he tells her, and doesn’t fall back asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> title from [sober - lorde](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvgigkaSCZA) which in my mind describes the veronica/archie dynamic. no i will not elaborate
> 
> i'm on [tumblr!](https://englishmajorjughead.tumblr.com/) :~)


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